Nasty, Nasty Gossip and Other Stuff That's Bad for You

Friday, April 3, 2009

* At San Francisco's Rare Device, Portland artist Mark Warren Jacques' The Optimistic Life & Mind opens with a reception from 7 to 9 p.m. The young painter's colorful, graphic, and highly detailed work is "a testament to Jacques' sense of order within disorder and acute presence of mind." The show will be up through April 29 at Rare Device, 1845 Market St. at Guerrero. (If you're not in the area, you can view and purchase Jacques' pieces for the show here.)

* Hop on the Bay Bridge and head over to Oakland's Swarm Gallery, where John Casey's solo show, Distant Cousins, opens with an artist's reception from 6 to 9 p.m. At first glance, Casey's works "seem to portray a menagerie of deformed creatures. A collective analysis reveals this array of oddball creations to be a series of psychological studies -- self-portraits of the artist's inner psyche in all of its multifaceted incarnations."

* Good battles evil at Rock Paper Scissors Collective's new exhibition, Heroes and Villains, which kicks off with an opening reception from 6 to 9 p.m. The show offers "a new and interesting eye on the classic dichotomy of chivalry and ugliness, portraiture and caricature, love and death." Artists include Arnell Ando, Teppei Ando, Graham Annable, David Ball, Ben Catmull, Mary Cook, Alika Cooper, Matt Hart, Matt Hewitt, Obi Kaufman, An Nguyen, Jonah Olson, Deth P. Sun, Mark Todd, and Derek Wood. Heroes and Villains will be up through April 25 at Rock Paper Scissors, 2278 Telegraph Ave. at 23rd St. in Uptown Oakland.

* At Oakland's Rowan Morrison, Small Ruins, featuring the photography of Hannah Henry, opens with an artist's reception from 7 to 10 p.m. Henry's large-scale photographs showcase "objects from the bottom of people's hearts and drawers: things with a past but no longer a purpose. The photos depict an individual object set against a blank background, highlighting the object itself, and begging of it a myriad of imaginary narratives." The show will be up through May 9 at Rowan Morrison, 330 40th St. at Broadway.

Thursday, April 9

* Finally, the show I've been anticipating with baited breath for months: Marci Washington's Dark Mirror at San Francisco's Rena Bransten Gallery. Washington's "lush paintings work on several levels to build suspicion and to enhance an ominous sense of discomfort and crisis in viewers. She achieves this by depicting ghosts, haunted houses, vampires, dismembered limbs, bloody scenery, and an assortment of sallow young people who serve as metaphors for serious social ills. Washington’s model for a doomed society was Edwardian England, whose rigid social norms and repressive imperialist vision sparked its decline -- a situation Washington feels is mirrored by a present-day America. Her Edwardian characters and romance novel format allow Washington 'to construct an allegorical tale ... in order to reveal a much darker tale of moral decline, spiritual crisis, and rampant anxiety, all lurking beneath the siren song of material desire.'” I'm not exactly sure what that means, but I do know that Washington's deliciously dark and twisted images give me chills (in the best possible way). Dark Mirror will be up through May 16 at Rena Bransten, 77 Geary St. at Kearny.